Three years on, Natalya Estemirova's murder unsolved

Three years ago this week, Natalya Estemirova,
a contributor to the independent newspaper Novaya
Gazeta and a local staffer for the Moscow-based rights group Memorial, was
murdered in the North Caucasus, Russia's volatile region, where she was famous
for her work as a defender of human rights.

On the morning of July 15, 2009, Natalya left
her apartment building, located in one of Grozny's residential areas, and
headed to the bus stop to go to work. On her way, two unknown men, clad in
camouflage uniforms, snatched her and shoved her into their car. (The official
investigation would later determine that two other men and a woman were also
involved in Estemirova's abduction.) She managed to scream that she was being
kidnapped. At least one witness saw the incident as it unraveled, but would
later be too fearful to testify.

At 4:30 pm that day, Natalya Estemirova's
lifeless body, pierced by five gunshots, was discovered in the neighboring
republic of Ingushetia, on the side of a highway connecting Russia's city of Rostov
and Azerbaijan's capital, Baku.

The first people to learn about Estemirova's abduction
were her colleagues at the Grozny office of Memorial. They rushed to her
apartment block and interviewed Natalya's neighbors. Memorial's Yekaterina
Sokiryanskaya, who was at the scene, told CPJ: "People were afraid to talk to
us, and only one woman said that Natalya was abducted. But she categorically
refused to name herself or tell us her address."

Three years after the murder, investigators
have failed to identify or collect testimony from this and other witnesses of
Estemirova's abduction.

The execution of the most prominent rights
activist in the Caucasus sparked an outcry at home and abroad. Aleksandr
Bastrykin, head of Russia's Investigative Committee, the agency tasked with
solving serious crimes in the country, declared he would personally oversee
Estemirova's murder probe. Russian authorities also formed an investigative
group and put Igor Sobol, chief investigator with the Investigative Committee's
Main Directorate for the Southern Federal District, in charge of the probe.

Among the lead motives investigators initially
considered in Estemirova's killing was her professional activity as a
journalist and human rights defender, including the possibility that she was
murdered by local police officers angered by her exposés of human rights abuses
in which they were implicated.

After the 2006 killing of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Natalya
Estemirova was the only reporter who openly criticized Chechen leader Ramzan
Kadyrov and his circle, and reported on human rights abuses committed by
Chechen law enforcement. She was also the only critical journalist who lived
permanently in Grozny despite threats and warnings she received regularly in
connection with her work.

Despite the possibility that Chechen police
could be involved in Estemirova's murder--and the resulting conflict of
interest--local police officers were included in the group formed to
investigate her killing. It was Chechen police officers who conducted all forensic
activities in the case, and who came up with an alternative alleged motive for
Estemirova's killing--the one that, eventually, would become the official lead.
According
to that version, it was a Chechen guerrilla fighter, Alkhazur Bashayev, who
allegedly killed Estemirova because he was angered that she was looking into
reports that separatists were recruiting young men from the village of
Shalazhi.

During the last weeks of her life Natalya
Estemirova worked on several high-profile cases of abduction and extrajudicial
executions of Chechen citizens; she suspected local law enforcement and
security services were involved in the crimes. Estemirova made several public
statements on these cases, and she helped the victims' relatives file
complaints before the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights.

A July 17, 2009, New York Times report said that three months before her murder, Estemirova
had been summoned for questioning by Chechen police, "an incident that so
worried her co-workers at Memorial that they reported it to the Council of
Europe." The Times also said a
meeting took place between Estemirova's Moscow-based Memorial supervisor, Oleg
Orlov, and Nurdi Nukhazhiyev, the pro-Kadyrov Chechen human rights ombudsman.
Speaking five days before Estemirova was killed, according to the account,
Nukhazhiyev told Orlov that high-ranking officials were "extremely
dissatisfied" with Memorial's most recent investigations.

At the beginning of the investigation into
Estemirova's murder, head detective Sobol made attempts to look into all
murders and abductions she had reported on. However, those efforts did not
bring results because of widespread fear of giving testimony among Chechen
residents. In August 2009, Bastrykin publicly spoke of the difficulties his
agency encountered in Chechnya: "Investigating cases, including the murder of
Natalya Estemirova, is extremely difficult. A lot of people are afraid to cooperate
with the investigation," he said.

Despite the apparent conflict of interest,
Bastryin's office transferred cases alleging involvement of Chechen law
enforcement and security agents in criminal activity--those same cases that
Estemirova had been investigating prior to her murder--to the jurisdiction of
none other than the Chechnya branch of the Investigative Committee, according
to reporting by Novaya Gazeta.

How effective could local investigators be in
those cases? The record does not bode well. Three weeks after Estemirova's
murder, human rights activists Zarema Sadullayeva and Alik Dzhabrailov were
detained by Chechen law enforcement agents at their office, with witnesses
present, according to an August 2011 report by Memorial. The next day, the
activists' maimed bodies were found in the trunk of a car in one of Grozny's
districts. In a separate case, in October 2009, another Chechen human rights
activist, Zarema Gaisanova, disappeared during a special operation that Ramzan
Kadyrov personally headed, the independent news website Civitas reported. No
one has been arrested in these murders.

These crimes entirely paralyzed the work of
journalists and rights organizations in Chechnya. The impunity heightened fear
among local residents, who stopped seeking help from rights activists,
reporters, and law enforcement alike. Silence and fear have become the
fundamentals of the so-called stability in Kadyrov's Chechnya.

Against this backdrop, an objective and
thorough official investigation into Estemirova's murder is a daunting task.

According to the official version, Estemirova
was killed by guerrilla fighter Bashayev on the orders of notorious Chechen Islamist
militant Doku Umarov, who is often termed Russia's Osama Bin Laden. Umarov's
motive for the murder, the official version goes, was to disrupt negotiations
between Russia's then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, and German Chancellor Angela
Merkel. Bashayev reportedly received a payment of US$14,000 from Umarov for the
hit. However, a money trail was never established; instead, the payment
allegation was made in testimony by a former Chechen guerrilla fighter by the
name of A.S. Bakarov, who is imprisoned for a different crime. Bakarov's
testimony is among the materials of the investigation into Estemirova's murder,
which were obtained by Novaya Gazeta
and Memorial.

The key evidence presented by investigators in
Estemirova' case is a weapons stash that Chechen police claimed they found in
Bashayev's home in the village of Shalazhi. Among the stash, Chechen
investigators said, was the Estemirova murder weapon as well as a forged police
identification bearing Bashayev's picture, according to an independent investigation
by Memorial, Novaya Gazeta, and the
International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH). Chechen police also claimed
they had found the car used for Estemirova's abduction; inside the vehicle,
they said, was a silencer the killers used on the murder weapon, according to
the materials of the official investigation.

However, not a single forensic exam has
confirmed the authenticity of these items claimed to be evidence. On the
contrary, analyses commissioned by Sobol himself have questioned the validity
of the items submitted as evidence by the Chechen police, the Memorial, Novaya Gazeta, and FIDH investigation
found.

In their report, the groups criticized
investigators for focusing solely on the Bashayev lead at the expense of other
key leads--such as the possibility of involvement of Chechen law enforcement
officers in Estemirova's slaying.

The Bashayev lead, moreover, is a dead end
because of the uncertainty of the guerrilla fighter's fate. According to a 2009
report by Chechen authorities, Bashayev was killed in a special operation; however,
as recently as June 2012, Bastrykin told journalists that Bashayev was believed
to be hiding in Belgium.

CPJ repeatedly sought an interview with head
investigator Igor Sobol for an update on the Estemirova murder probe, to no
avail. When approached in early July with questions on the status of the
investigation, Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin turned down
the request. A colleague of Markin's did inform CPJ, however, that, "due to his
excessive workload," Sobol is to transfer Estemirova's case to another
investigator.

As in other cases, including the high- profile
probes into U.S. Editor Paul
Klebnikov's murder and the brutal beating of Kommersant business daily reporter
Oleg
Kashin, such reshuffles spell one thing and one thing alone--the burying of
the cases for good.

Elena Milashina is an award-winning, investigative journalist with Novaya Gazeta and a Moscow correspondent for CPJ.

Comments

I wrote this poem for her a few years ago:

Poem for Natalya

For I didn't know you
Until you died a callous murder
Though your integrity lay intact.
For the bravery you humbly hid
Beneath the countless souls
you helped to protect
Somewhere near the perilous
Caucasus Mountains.

Natalya:
I marvel at your courage
And I've never met you
Though I would have wanted.

You met the tragic irony of your own courage:
You met the same fate of others
You sought to protect.

For we remember you by your first name alone;
You were murdered for your cause
And your cause had you murdered.

You were in a line of other needless deaths
Like Anna, Stanislav Umar, Sulim, Ruslan, bludgeoned in cold blood;
The convoluted Russian spy games
Reduced to sheer chicanery
Masking the simplicity of shrouding the truth.

You did not die in vain.
Your enemies thought
You were a robber of truth,
And they will be punished.
You are somewhere amongst us
Beyond the withering trees.